We are the goon squad and we're coming to town (beep-beep)

On the walk to the office this morning I found myself behind a trio of young people. That, in and of itself, is unremarkable (unless one draws fascination in the fact people were walking in L.A., despite the old Missing Persons song that makes claims to the contrary). What did catch my notice was the footwear of one of the trio, a petite woman.

From the back she appeared to be wearing ankle boots; solid leather (or whatever the material was) went from the heel to her pants. Being as tall as I am I soon came up alongside the woman and out of the corner of my eye I noticed something I would not expect: her toes.

Twit-pertunity

Twitter allows us to share those clever quips that occur to us when there's no one around to say them to in person.

It also allows us to share those thoughts that seemed like they'd be clever but ultimately were really best served by having no one around to have to hear them. Ah, the good ol' days...

Playing it safe

Shows like Ice Road Truckers or Deadliest Catch and others of that ilk do not make me fancy that I, sitting on the sofa watching*, could engage in such dangerous professions. They make me appreciate my humble desk job—which would not make for an entertaining reality show no matter how much they manipulated the footage—all the more.

You'll notice that when I write, I never touch on the nuts and bolts of the activities involved with how I make a living. That is no coincidence.

(Heck, it's only by stretching and a tongue-in-cheek tone** that the thoughts I have when I'm not working can prove remotely worthy of being written down—and that's a matter of dubious justification, even under the best of circumstances.)

I take some solace in believing I know what level of attention the rest of the world should pay to me, and not demanding any.

But if you read this, I do appreciate the time you devoted to li'l ol' me. Seriously.

~


* I've only ever actually seen the commercials, but I like to think I got the gist of the shows from those. That's enough, right?

** Not that this post has much of that tone, but many of the other posts do. Well, I like to think they do, but... This isn't helping, is it? 

A tragic cycle

There is no such thing as personal tragedy anymore; there are merely obstacles that make it easier to get a book deal or an option on a reality show.

Which can be another "tragedy" that leads to another reality show...

Smart phones are too smart

With the ubiquity of smart phones and the ability to respond to emails using those little (often virtual) keyboards it's not uncommon (at least in my experience) for people to have a message automatically appended to the emails sent from the devices that identify that situation and ask forgiveness from the recipient(s) for any "typos."

For the longest time this intrigued me. While I imagined the subtext of the message was "these stupid keys are too small for my big fingers"—which, let's be fair, is an odd thing to actively imply with every email sent—but the deeper message seemed to be "hey, you should just be happy I bothered to respond at all and not expect me to actually bother to make sure these words are correct" or "I don't know how to run a spell check on this device and I'm too lazy or technologically inept to figure it out." I also wondered if the implication of wanting the errors in the text of messages because they sent from the mobile device meant that in messages sent while one was a computer with a full keyboard (and, presumably, easier spell checking capability) any errors there should be mercilessly mocked.

In short, every possible interpretation of that disclaimer (of sorts) that the phone included at the end of the text was an admission of a larger failing. Frankly, I thought it would be better just to embrace one's flubs and not bother with that at the end of emails, because it really wasn't helping to ask for special treatment.